With the maturing of the all-flash array (AFA) market, the established market leaders in this space are turning their attention to other ways to differentiate themselves from their competition besides just product functionality. Consciously designing and driving a better customer experience (CX) is a strategy being pursued by many of these vendors.This white paper defines cloud-based predictive analytics and discusses evolving storage requirements that are driving their use and takes a look at how these platforms are being used to drive incremental value for public sector organizations in the areas of performance, availability, management, recovery, and information technology (IT) infrastructure planning.

With the maturing of the all-flash array (AFA) market, the established market leaders in this space are turning their attention to other ways to differentiate themselves from their competition besides just product functionality. Consciously designing and driving a better customer experience (CX) is a strategy being pursued by many of these vendors.This white paper defines cloud-based predictive analytics and discusses evolving storage requirements that are driving their use and takes a look at how these platforms are being used to drive incremental value for public sector organizations in the areas of performance, availability, management, recovery, and information technology (IT) infrastructure planning.

During the course of research efforts in the all-flash array (AFA) space, IDC is still encountering IT executives, particularly CIOs and CFOs, who have an outdated perspective on relevant cost metrics for comparing all-flash solutions with legacy hard disk drive (HDD)–based systems. In IDC's view, flash is an absolute requirement for performance reasons in any 3rd Platform computing environment. While most understand the need for flash performance, there is still a subset that does not view the broader use of flash in the enterprise as cost effective

This IDC Buyer Case Study reviews how Cobb EMC, a regional not-for-profit electric utility company serving the greater Atlanta metropolitan area, addressed evolving IT infrastructure requirements with flash storage technology to improve performance and substantially improve IT efficiencies. This Buyer Case Study explores what drove Cobb EMC's initial interest in flash, how flash deployment has evolved in the company's environments, how the deployment has impacted its business, and what future plans exist for AFAs at Cobb EMC.

The technical and financial advantages of solid state drives are driving a rapid transition from hard disk-drive (HDD) and hybrid-flash array (HFA) storage systems to all-flash arrays (AFAs). The white paper identifies some of the key considerations for evaluating all-flash storage infrastructure for three major uses cases: standalone applications, virtualized applications, and next-generation cloud services.

Flash storage is taking the enterprise market by storm. With all-flash arrays (AFAs) now available from every major enterprise storage vendor, they are quickly becoming a mainstream general purpose deployment platform for mixed workloads. According to IDC, flash technology will come to dominate primary storage platforms by 2020.
Read this independent whitepaper to learn what sets the NetApp AFF apart from other AFAs on the market, and discover why IDC describes the AFF as “the crown jewel” in the NetApp portfolio of all-flash storage solutions.

As flash storage has permeated mainstream computing, enterprises are coming to better understand
not only its performance benefits but also the secondary economic benefits of flash deployment at
scale. This combination of benefits — lower latencies, higher throughput and bandwidth, higher
storage densities, much lower energy and floor space consumption, higher CPU utilization, the need
for fewer servers and their associated lower software licensing costs, lower administration costs, and
higher device-level reliability — has made the use of AFAs an economically compelling choice
relative to legacy storage architectures initially developed for use with hard disk drives (HDDs). As
growth rates for hybrid flash arrays (HFAs) and HDD-only arrays fall off precipitously, AFAs are
experiencing one of the highest growth rates in external storage today — a compound annual growth
rate (CAGR) of 26.2% through 2020.

This paper examines enterprise-class snapshot technologies, discussing use cases for snapshots as well as classic challenges associated with using snapshot technologies in pure hard disk drive (HDD)–based arrays.

Read this vendor assessment from IDC and find out about the suitability of 10 vendors' AFA platforms for dense mixed enterprise workload consolidation. Discover the areas where the most differentiation between vendors was noted, including their strategies around NVMe and cloud-based predictive analytics.

Pure Storage has significant expertise creating scalable, enterprise-class, flash-optimized storage platforms, and with FlashBlade, Pure Storage has crafted a turnkey, purpose-built platform that is well suited to cost effectively handle the performance and capacity requirements of genomics workflows. Pure Storage has differentiated itself from more established enterprise storage providers by delivering an industry-leading customer experience, as shown by its extremely high NPS, indicating it knows how to meet and is committed to meeting customer requirements. Whether genomics practitioners plan an on-premises deployment or a cloud-based deployment for their genomics workflows, they should consider the performance, cost, and patient care advantages of the Pure Storage FlashBlade when choosing a platform, particularly if they plan to retain data for a long time and use it frequently.

As flash costs continue to drop and new, flash-driven designs help to magnify the compelling economic advantages AFAs offer relative to HDD-based designs, mainstream adoption of AFAs —first for primary storage workloads and then ultimately for secondary storage workloads — will accelerate. Well-designed AFAs that still leverage legacy interfaces like SAS will be able to meet many performance requirements over the next year or two.
Those IT organisations that aim to best position themselves to handle future growth will want to look at next-generation AFA offerings, as the future is no longer flash-optimised architectures (implying that HDD design tenets had to be optimised around) —
it is flash-driven architectures.

There’s no question about it: purpose-built all-flash storage is an exceptional catalyst for improving data center operations and supporting the transition to the cloud operating model. AFAs’ highly strategic role in both IT and business underscores the need to move storage purchase discussions and decisions beyond the storage team. IT leaders who want to see their organizations reap AFAs’ benefits—performance improvement, productivity gains, and cost savings, among others—should actively define their AFA strategies and oversee storage-related decision making, thus treating storage like the newly strategic asset it has become.
To learn more, visit purestorage.com/cloud.

This IDC study provides detailed insights into the rapidly growing market for enterprise storage systems that leverage flash storage media. This study segments this market into the following two technology segments: AFAs and HFAs. Insights into these two market segments are provided historically. Market shares and IDC analysis are provided for each of the top vendors in these two segments along with detailed market-level analysis.

This white paper focuses on the increasing importance of high availability as enterprises continue to build out a 3rd Platform–based computing infrastructure. As more mission-critical applications requiring extremely high availability are deployed on virtual infrastructure, enterprises must respond using the right storage solutions. The document identifies critical features in the storage infrastructure necessary to meet these requirements for availability and explores how one vendor, NetApp, meets them with its EF-Series AFA solutions portfolio.

This IDC study provides detailed insights into the rapidly growing market for enterprise storage systems that leverage flash storage media. This study segments this market into the following two technology segments: AFAs and HFAs. Insights into these two market segments are provided historically. Market shares and IDC analysis are provided for each of the top vendors in these two segments along with detailed market-level analysis.

This paper examines enterprise-class snapshot technologies, discussing use cases for snapshots as well as classic challenges associated with using snapshot technologies in pure hard disk drive (HDD)–based arrays.

This IDC study represents a vendor assessment model called the IDC MarketScape. It's a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the characteristics that assess vendors' current and future success in the AFA market segment and provide a measure of the vendors' ascendancy to become a Leader or maintain a leadership position. IDC MarketScape assessments are particularly helpful in emerging markets that are often fragmented, have several players, and lack clear leaders.